~snip~
Officials in the Shivpuri district of India's Madhya Pradesh state, needing a promising program to slow the country's still-booming birth rate, announced in March that men who volunteer for vasectomies will be rewarded with certificates that speed them through the ordinarily slow line to obtain gun permits. Said an administrator, the loss, through vasectomy, of a "perceived notion of manliness" would be offset "with a bigger symbol of manliness." [Agence France-Presse, 3-18-08]
~snip~

Cosmetic castration banned
Wed Apr 2, 2008 11:12am EDT
BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thailand's health chiefs barred hospitals and clinics on Wednesday from castrating would-be "ladyboys" amid growing concern about the operation being seen as a cheap and quick alternative to a full sex-change.

In a letter to 16,000 private health units, the Public Health Ministry said doctors performing the operation outside formal sex-change therapy -- which requires rigorous physical and mental evaluation of the patient -- faced up to six months in jail.

However, senior health official Tara Chinakarn admitted that policing the temporary ban might be difficult as cosmetic removal of the testicles was such a quick operation and easy to conduct in secret.

"It's hard to track them down as it takes only 15-20 minutes to have the surgery," Tara told Reuters.

Thailand is home to a large number of "ladyboys," or "katoey" in Thai, a term that covers anything from a transvestite to a man who has undergone a full sex change.

The tolerance shown towards the "third sex," as it is often referred to, has led to the country becoming a world leader in sex-change surgery.

However, at the lower end of the market, clinics have responded to demand from teenage boys to look more like girls by posting Internet advertisements offering castration for as little as 4,000 baht ($125).

So, take the bullets out of one gun, and get a permit to carry another?

lol.

To India: Not a bad idea, but it could use some thought. Instead of getting to your gun licence quicker, one could get certain benefits, like a monthly pension special for them, etc. It would create less killing, and would acually help the citizens of India.

__________________
"Imagine closing your eyes, and then once you open them, everything you took for granted was not." - Chuck Schuldiner

To India: Not a bad idea, but it could use some thought. Instead of getting to your gun licence quicker, one could get certain benefits, like a monthly pension special for them, etc. It would create less killing, and would acually help the citizens of India.

Or perhaps a little education to prove the benefits of not having too many children and that having live spermatazoa in your ballbags has very little to do with being a man.

__________________
Life's hard you know, so strike a pose on a Cadillac

Xiphos, not to derail the thread, but I am one of several who will always be willing to remind you that generous private armament is a crime suppressant as the experience of every single State in the Union -- and yours first, in 1987 -- that has liberalized private CCW has shown. Killings go down when the blood-minded have to guess who might have the fangs. The famed helpless bystander just may not be so helpless. The well directed bullet works every bit as well slaying the bad guy as the innocent.

Genocide and violent crime happen to disarmed people -- disarmed either by bad law or by clever generalship on the part of their attacker to neutralize their armed strength. Armed people don't catch much of this kind of trouble.

Gunnery doesn't create killing, not of itself. Not next to murder in the heart. And if your will is to murder, you hardly need a gun. A big wet rock will kill just as dead. Effort involved really doesn't change principle. A black belt martial artist could tell you the same. He might know six ways to kill a man by hitting him in his neck and fourteen more striking his spine, but does this knowledge, and even assiduous practice of these techniques, set him on a road to some inevitable killing? It does not.

Big wet rocks, broadswords, skinny swords, skinny-dipping in the Arctic, pantsing skinheads in a bar to find out which ones are circumcised, and other ingenious tries for the Darwin Awards...

Sundae, when your country had private arms widely distributed, you had a crime and murder rate that was between minuscule and microscopic. Thanks to Parliament not knowing its arse from a knothole on this, you have administratively bought your increased crime rate. It went up steeply after your disarmament program really kicked in. Your nation desperately needs to find its Charlton Heston. Then and only then will you enjoy the low crime rate you did in the days of being armed, and a man's home his castle.

Otherwise, the home invaders really are going to have to be repelled with boiling oil, arrows, and swordwork.

Here, we shoot them, over much of our land. Less messy in the end. Unless that's where we hit them.

Thanks to Parliament not knowing its arse from a knothole on this, you have administratively bought your increased crime rate. It went up steeply after your disarmament program really kicked in. Your nation desperately needs to find its Charlton Heston. Then and only then will you enjoy the low crime rate you did in the days of being armed, and a man's home his castle.

Translated - Great Britian does is not ruled by 'big dics'. Therefore Great Britian has been castrated. Quoted from "The World According to UG".

~snip~Marine biologists studying wild octopuses have found a kinky and violent society of jealous murders, gender subtrefuge and once-in-a-lifetime sex. The new study by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, who journeyed off the coast of Indonesia found that wild octopuses are far from the shy, unromantic loners their captive brethren appear to be.

The scientists watched the Abdopus aculeatus octopus, which are the size of an orange, for several weeks and published their findings recently in the journal Marine Biology. They witnessed picky, macho males carefully select a mate, then guard their newly domesticated digs so jealously that they would occasionally use their 20-to-25-centimetre tentacles to strangle a romantic rival to death.

The researchers also observed smaller “sneaker” male octopuses put on feminine airs, such as swimming girlishly near the bottom and keeping their male brown stripes hidden in order to win unsuspecting conquests.

Shortly after the female gives birth, about a month after conception, both the mother and father die, researchers said.

“It’s not the sex that leads to death,” said Christine Huffard, the study’s lead author. “It’s just that octopuses produce offspring once during a very short lifespan of a year.” I guess the conclusion is that underwater sea life is very similar to us.
~snip~

Translated - Great Britian does is not ruled by 'big dics'. Therefore Great Britian has been castrated. Quoted from "The World According to UG".

Translated even better: I've studied the arms/society interface. You have not. But that won't stop you from uttering your ten-millionth stupidity, will it? You've no idea how sympathetic you are to crime and genocide in your acute, inexcusable ignorance, which keeps you grossly immoral. Meh, it accords with the rest of your grossnesses.

And then there's your copyediting. Wow. Well, it does match the quality of your thought. You no more believe in copyediting so at least your words are spelled right than you do in integrity.

~snip~PARIS (AP) — The French parliament's lower house adopted a groundbreaking bill Tuesday that would make it illegal for anyone — including fashion magazines, advertisers and Web sites — to publicly incite extreme thinness.

The National Assembly approved the bill in a series of votes Tuesday, after the legislation won unanimous support from the ruling conservative UMP party. It goes to the Senate in the coming weeks.

Fashion industry experts said that, if passed, the law would be the strongest of its kind anywhere. Leaders in French couture are opposed to the idea of legal boundaries on beauty standards.

The bill was the latest and strongest of measures proposed after the 2006 anorexia-linked death of a Brazilian model prompted efforts throughout the international fashion industry to address the repercussions of using ultra-thin models.

Conservative lawmaker Valery Boyer, author of the law, argued that encouraging anorexia or severe weight loss should be punishable in court.

Doctors and psychologists treating patients with anorexia nervosa — a disorder characterized by an abnormal fear of becoming overweight — welcomed the government's efforts to fight self-inflicted starvation, but warned that its link with media images remains hazy.

French lawmakers and fashion industry members signed a nonbinding charter last week on promoting healthier body images. Spain in 2007 banned ultra-thin models from catwalks.

But Boyer said such measures did not go far enough.

Her bill has mainly brought focus to pro-anorexic Web sites that give advice on how to eat an apple a day — and nothing else.

But Boyer insisted in her speech to lawmakers Tuesday that the legislation was much broader and could, in theory, be used against many facets of the fashion industry.

It would give judges the power to imprison and fine offenders up to $47,000 if found guilty of “inciting others to deprive themselves of food” to an “excessive” degree, Boyer said in a telephone interview before the parliamentary session.

Judges could also sanction those responsible for a magazine photo of a model whose “excessive thinness ... altered her health,” she said.

Boyer said she was focusing on women's health, though the bill applies to models of both sexes. The French Health Ministry says most of the 30,000 to 40,000 people with anorexia in France are women.

Didier Grumbach, president of the influential French Federation of Couture, said he was not aware how broad the proposed legislation was, and made no secret of his strong disapproval of such a sweeping measure.

“Never will we accept in our profession that a judge decides if a young girl is skinny or not skinny,” he said. “That doesn't exist in the world, and it will certainly not exist in France.”

Marleen S. Williams, a psychology professor at Brigham Young University in Utah who researches the media's effect on anorexic women, said it was nearly impossible to prove that the media causes eating disorders.

Williams said studies show fewer eating disorders in “cultures that value full-bodied women.” Yet with the new French legal initiative, she fears, “you're putting your finger in one hole in the dike, but there are other holes, and it's much more complex than that.”